There are plenty of materials on getting development and operations to work together. More conversations are happening around inclusion of other technology groups, such as DBAs and QA testers, into DevOps processes. That said, DevOps conversations has been largely devoid of talk about BizOps place at the table. The goal for any tech-centric group is not to build and/or architect the best technology, but rather to effectively support business. Yet, many of those groups are either not privy to or don’t bother understanding the business goals and overarching effects of the technical decisions made. In this talk I’ll discuss key areas and feedback points in every DevOps process fit for inclusion of business units in order to align technology and business goals and make your life easier.

I gave a talk at DevOpsDays Denver, talking about collaboration of testing and monitoring and production troubleshooting.

Identifying and fixing issues in new code before deploying it to production is important for every software development cycle. However, relying on traditional testing methods in the age of Internet-scale data driven problems may prove to be incomplete. Identifying and fixing the issues in production quickly is crucial, but it requires insight into usage patterns and trends across the whole architecture and application logic. In this talk I touch on inefficiencies of some of the most common testing methods, provide real world examples of discovering odd edge cases with monitoring and offer recommendations on top-down metric instrumentation to help DevOps organizations with identifying and acting on business-effecting problems.

As the holiday rush is winding down, I sit here reflecting on all the companies that lost business/revenue over the past few days. Loss of business not because of technology failure, although this is always a manifestation of a problem, but because of process failure in order to remedy the failures of technology. I’ve offered some tips on preparing for the holiday traffic from the system architecture perspective, but perhaps I should’ve concentrated on preparing for the rush from the organizational perspective.Continue reading Reflecting on holidays

Yesterday, at the #watercooler, we were talking about the principals of devops (and how they were applied before the term was cool) and sharing war stories about organizations that preferred to intentionally wall off individual technology groups. Conversation turned to how running the code in production is the only measurable way to validate developers code, and instilling the culture that shares the responsibility for production readiness between operations and development teams is the way to go. As we were talking about it, I realized that despite the fact that majority of developers firmly believe that “It worked on my laptop” is a piss poor excuse for production failures, most don’t truly understand why it is virtually impossible to make your development environment representative of production.

Last week, I was doing some research about my upcoming trip to Tanzania. I was browsing the web, looking for good deals on trip packages, reading feedback and comments from people who went on a similar trip, checking prerequisites (shots, visas)–basically general research anyone would do when going on a trip to a place where they’ve never been, or looking to buy a new product and trying to choose from the selections. Later that week I was checking my Gmail account, and, what do you know? The news ticker above the email showed me: NYT Travel – Next Stop: Off Tanzania, Serene Mafia Island. Obviously the article was targeted specifically to me, based upon my research over the few previous days, and it did provide me with some new information. But, is it a valuable service that companies provide, or an invasion of privacy–an abuse of the collected data that was never meant to be public?Continue reading Let’s get personal

I recently was invited to join RSS Ray during his weekly radio program “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” broadcasted on WS Radio, to discuss the challenges in creating and operating business online. We covered a lot of great topics that would be relevant to anyone trying to either build or improve their web presence, starting from pointers on what to look for when selecting a vendor, to scalability and security considerations, and all the way to the tips on choosing the right CMS for your business. You can listen to the two-part podcast below.Continue reading Discussing business online

Content Management Systems (CMS) have become one of the most powerful internet-related products. What once was a gadget for web developers and technology geeks is now a must-have tool for various business units. Because of the pace at which the world of internet technology changes, and the high demand for up-to-date content availability, there are thousands of products (commercial and open source alike) that offer a myriad of features to the companies in need of a solution to publish their content.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, the term “CMS” has become a buzz word, a commodity if you will. Everything web-related (short of social media, and that’s changing nowdays as well) has been rolled into those three characters. Originally (loosely) defined as “web application to create, edit, store and publish online content”, CMS has transformed into a much larger beast, covering e-commerce inventory management, SEO tool, workflow creator, and much much more. There are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of “How to choose CMS” articles out there, all composed from different perspectives, starting from a designer usability stand and ending with a CFO financial point of view. This article is not one of them. The goal here is to separate the term “CMS” into two very distinct components, and analyze the impact and/or the importance of each in a context of selecting a system to support your business.Continue reading Anatomy of business driven CMS